Category Archives: Search

Music, Search, Startups, Travel

The future of Blog Search

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Does Blog Search have a future?

Blogs are one of the richest sources of information for certain classes of information. Yet they are frustratingly hard to find or extract information from, and the state of the art (Google, Technorati) feel 100% stagnant. Here are a couple of example use cases I have that aren’t well served by existing tools:

1. Recruiting. When I recruit for a particular role, I’m looking for thought leaders or people with insight and passion. Usually these people have blogs. If I could see, for example, a list of all the people in the Boston area with blogs that blog about web development, I’d probably find some rock star developers. No easy way to do this today.
2. Travel planning. I’m thinking about a stay in southern Utah at a Bed & Breakfast. Who’s blogged about their trips there that might have some good perspective for me?
3. Music Discovery. Great blogs like Aurgasm, Quietcolor or TheMusicSlut are great ways to find music. But how many others like that are out there?

The current serious choices are pretty much limited to using normal search (Google, Bing etc), or using a Blog search engine like Google Blog Search or Technorati. With Google Blog Search, you get pretty much a toned-down version of Google: a search box with 10 results – you can’t really search for *blogs*, you can only search for *posts*, with the relevance ranking determined by some version of PageRank. There’s no real sense of the authority of a blog (other than that of PageRank), and no real opportunity for discovery – just punch in your keywords and hope for the best.

With Technorati, you do get some increased power. You can search for blogs as entities distinct from an individual post, and blogs do get assigned an authority score. But the experience seems to fail as often as succeed. A search for “boston web developer” blogs on Technorati returns three blogs, all with an authority score of 1 ( the minimum) – pretty sure there are more than 3 of this kind of blog in Boston! And there’s no way to sort the blogs by their authority score, at least that I can see. The Technorati blog directory also seems to be mostly limited to “authoritative” blogs – personal blogs (for example my own) seem to have little or no representation. But on long tail topics (say, music reviews of obscure artists), blogs by “real people” are often the only place to find this kind of commentary. Most importantly, there seems to be little innovation happening in Google Blog Search, Technorati, or more generally – the field is stagnant.

What would the characteristics of a good blog search tool be? What’s lacking in today’s approaches?
1. Comprehensiveness. There’s hundreds of millions of blogs (Billions?) – yet Technorati doesn’t seem to find many of them. (Google is more comprehensive, but limited by the “search box + 10 results” interface).
2. Ranking of blogs relative to search query and/or authority of author. (Of course this ranking problem is non-trivial. There are some interesting ideas on authority for twitter accounts which could perhaps be leveraged, e.g. http://thenoisychannel.com/2009/01/13/a-twitter-analog-to-pagerank/)
3. A faceted, searchable directory of blogs supporting discovery. Categorization technology has come a long way. It ought to be possible to categorize every blog against a reasonably detained taxonomy or facet set (say, the Open Directory categories, or something better), with 80% accuracy, across some common facets: topics, locations, age of blog, date of last post, and so forth. Even at 80% accuracy, this asset would be quite effective. And with a little UGC thrown in, the 20% that matter, and are wrong, will quickly get corrected. Using a microformat like hCard, blog authors could document their blog’s metadata quickly and accurately. Blogs also typically have some consistent thematic elements, such as an “About” page or a Blogroll list, that could be mined for interesting metadata. This kind of experience would power a new way to discover fresh and interesting blogs & content.
4. Recommend other, similar blogs. Powered by the facets above, or by a blogroll analysis, or something similar, a recommendation feature for similar blogs could be implemented, based on information readily available in an “almost standard” format.

Verticalized Blog Search Engines might also provide some task-centric capabilities. As I’ve written before, the future of search is about providing task-centric search capabilities. In music for example, The Hype Machine has some very interesting behaviors it can support, simply by virtue of being focused on music.

The obvious question: what business or investment model would support this kind of vertical search engine? In the Goby world of travel and entertainment, there’s a long history of various ways to monetize that kind of content. In the “pure content” world of blog search, it’s less clear – a pure page-view based CPM ad model isn’t likely to work. If the New York Times can’t make that kind of model work, a startup probably can’t either. Perhaps some form of interest-based, downstream ad retargeting approach might get enough leverage that it could get to critical mass. Alternatively in some domains a “freemium” model might work, where additional tools (say for recruiters or brand managers looking for a competitive edge). Given the scale of the problem, it’s not clear a bootstrapped company could take this on – the infrastructure requirements (bandwidth for crawling, servers, etc) probably require a non-trivial level of investment.

What blog search tool do you use? Do you use a blog search tool? or just Google? Is anyone innovating in the area?

Goby, Search, Startups, Travel

Some thoughts on the convergence of Search, Travel, Local & Social

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There’s a convergence coming, between the worlds of search, travel, local, and social. It used to be that if you were traveling, you used a guidebook and map and talked to the concierge, then you graduated to TripAdvisor and Expedia (and if you were adventurous, Kayak). People’s use of search engines tended not to intersect with their travel planning. In recent years of course Google has become a de facto part of the travel planning experience – although by no means a perfect one. And some search engines have introduced travel products (notably Bing Travel). And for planning your weekend, search engines have historically not been of much use at all – they don’t understand the concept of time or location very well (“this weekend” is just a few keywords to them), and don’t understand your task (when I search for beaches on Cape Cod, why do I get back results for restaurants with the word “beach” in them?). Robert Scoble has some thoughts on this subject, here. Google appears to be moving in this direction, with their rumored acquisition of ITA, which powers many airfare metasearch sites including Kayak. Their abortive attempt to acquire Yelp shows how search & local are converging as well.

But there’s a new game in town – social/local gaming, in particular with things like Foursquare and Gowalla, that combine social gaming with local-search-like results, allowing people to broadcast where they are and what they’re doing. There’s an evolving “stack” of technologies, including location databases and engagement tools, nicely summarized by Chris Dixon. (I disagree with his assertion that location databases will become commoditized – the information is too hard to come by, and companies like InfoUSA make hundreds of millions in revenue providing this kind of data. Not to mention the startups like SimpleGeo and Locationary and for that matter Goby, that are tackling the problem, but I digress).

This kind of engagement is going to have a profound impact on how people plan travel and figure out their weekends. DeepDish Creative (http://deepdishcreative.com/wordpress/2010/02/foursquare-for-tourism/) is talking about how destination marketing organizations can leverage these tools to promote their destination. But I see two problems with this generation of tools as they apply to this problem:

  1. They are after-the-fact. I tend to engage with Foursquare after I’m already AT someplace – Foursquare isn’t really involved in my decision process, it simply records what I’ve already decided. As a result, it has limited use (not no use, just limited use) in making decisions.
  2. These tools only recognize a limited set of entities, primarily businesses (in fact, primarily restaurants). It’s hard to check in at a U2 concert, because it’s an event, and it’s hard to check in at the Grand Canyon, because it’s not really an entity, it’s a generalized (and off-the-beaten-track) place. God help you if you want to check-in on a hiking trail!

Addressing those last two elements would create a resource that will not only appeal to my vanity & let me broadcast what I’m doing, but more importantly help me decide.

The key need here is a semantically meaningful database of things, to key all your features off of, and search tool to find & organize them – not just a pile of URLs. The system needs to know that Yo La Tengo is a band playing at the Fillmore on the 23rd of April, with a date and a location – not just a pile of keywords without any meaning. Any system like this needs to cover hotels and restaurants as well as non-business entities like hiking trails or concerts, and once you leave hotels/restaurants, this information is hard to come by. Once you have the database of entities, it is straightforward to build a platform for people to engage with their networks, in the context of that content. Once you have a strongly categorized, rich database of things to do, and a strong network of people telling you what they are interested in, you can provide compelling recommendations as well as support discovery. And, strangely enough 8), that’s where we’re headed with Goby – we plan to be right at the intersection of this convergence.

Search

Apple buys Siri – quick thoughts on how Google is being flanked….

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Following rapidly on my recent blog post about what Apple’s search strategy might be (https://www.viking2917.com/is-apple-building-a-search-engine-should-they/), they’ve bought Siri. A full frontal assault on Google is futile, but Facebook and Apple are both finding ways to attack Google in a flanking manner. Apple is doing it through entertainment, apps, rich advertising (Quattro acquisition), and task-centric, information-rich applications (Siri). Facebook is plastering “Like” buttons all over the internet, thus gaining very valuable information – “Like” is essentially a human-driven relevance signal, one that is much more direct and personalized than the algorithmic PageRank of Google, which relies on computing links and link values. Facebook’s “like” button gives them a simple popularity metric – how long before they use that to build a new kind of search & information access tool? Certainly such a metric is gamable, but at scale, it may not matter….

Goby, Search

Search Insider Summit & presentation

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Presented last week at the Search Insider Summit – great event with a lot of learnings. Everyone seems to be talking about the increased richness and personalization of search, and how it intersects with personal passions and the new social media environment, and what that means for traditional search marketing. Some roundtable notes can be found here: http://www.mediapost.com/blogs/raw/?p=2159.
My presentation focused on “context” as the organizing principle for search innovation. The future of search is about context. The era of one-size-fits-all search engines – a “search box and ten blue links” – is over. Gone are the days that a keyword search returns the same 10 results for every person, whenever and wherever they run the same query. Tomorrow’s search will be personalized, tailored for location, tailored for context, even for the weather! My presentation:

Abstract: The future of search is about context. The era of one-size-fits-all search engines – a “search box and ten blue links” – is over. The future will be contextualized and task-centric, focused on enabling discovery and not just keyword matching. Gone are the days that a keyword search returns the same 10 results for every person, whenever and wherever they run the same query. Tomorrow’s search will be personalized, tailored for location, tailored for context, even for the weather!

Context is environmental, task-centric, social, user-centric, and data & domain aware. Tomorrow’s search engines will know what time it is, where you are, what the weather is like, what your interests are – if you let them. They’ll know as much as you’ll let them about your social network and what they’re interested in, and let you leverage your network to help make decisions. They’ll use this entire context to do a better job of answering your query. Tomorrow’s search engines will have a much richer awareness of data than just a list of keywords – in addition to leveraging context, they will create context. They’ll condense volumes of information down to consumable “chunks” you can use to shape your discovery process. Based on your task and context, they’ll understand how to combine raw results with other information (photos & media, maps, summary views) to help you make sense of the ocean of information that’s out there.

This is starting to happen already. Drawing on examples from Google, Bing, Search Insider Summit alums Milo and Goby, and other new startups like Hunch and Siri, we’ll paint a picture for how tomorrow’s consumers will access information. We’ll explore what that might mean for brands and search marketing professionals looking for new and better ways to address the right audiences at the right time through the right channels.

Music, Search

Is Apple building a search engine? Should they?

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There are persistent rumors that Apple’s building a search engine. Apple does have many obvious motivations for wanting to have a search engine of some form. There’s the clash with Google over mobile dominance (iPhone vs Android), as well as the continuing need to make their devices (the iPad, iPhone, iPod, and Macs) continue to be “what the cool kids have”. What’s going to sell more gadgets? Content. (and apps, of course).

More broadly, Apple’s brand identity is undergoing a shift. Apple’s core audience has always been the cool, smart, hip people – the creative industry, the doers, the builders. But they are broadening their appeal to not just creators, but consumers. CV Harquail has a great take on this trend.

Are they building something? From the outside looking in, nobody knows. But if they are building something, I doubt it’s general purpose search. Building a search engine is getting easier and cheaper than it used to be, but it’s still a very significant investment of human and computing capital. If they were going that route, they’d just buy Yahoo. Or they could buy Cuil and get pure search at a much lower cost. But the reality is nobody wants another Google – a general purpose horizontal search engine – that’s why Cuil floundered – it doesn’t solve a problem people think they have. Google solves the problem it solves, well enough.

What does all that mean for what Apple should do in search? As I and others have written elsewhere, the future of search is about task and context. Search is the purest expression of consumer intent on the web – as Chris Dixon pointed out, that’s why Facebook has 1/30th the revenue of Google, with more web traffic.

Where does Apple care about consumer intent? Aside from when they are making device decisions, it’s when consumers buy media – music, movies, books, and other content. iTunes is a $2B per year business. So my guess is Apple’s new search engine might not even feel like a search engine. It will be a rich media site for searching & exploring the world of media. It will contain a lot of branded content (think New York Times, Netflix, Entertainment Tonight, Rolling Stone), and given Apple’s penchant for closed architectures, may even have a paid inclusion/pay-to-play model. Imagine a media search engine, helping you explore the world of media & entertainment, but incorporating significant amounts of social media content, centered around music, movies, art, books and other creative content. Of course with quick and easy ways to buy or stream things from iTunes 8). Something more like The Hype Machine than Google – and of course it would leverage the purchase of Lala. It will support exploration and social search as much as pure keyword search.Given Apple’s dominance in the creative world, and it’s brand power, it would have no trouble attracting advertisers to that kind of experience. iAd, anyone?

Is Apple building a search engine? Who knows.

Should they? Hell yes.

And knowing Apple’s design philosophy, it will be clean and elegant, with lots of rich media. It might feel kind of like a certain fishy search engine we know.